Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy

Deborah L. Krohn presents here the first full-length study of Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook. She treats the illustrations as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge.